Thursday, June 21, 2007
Winter
To those of you in the Northern Hemisphere- Enjoy your first day of summer and you can start sharing some of those extra hours of sunshine NOW. As for us, we already started winter. For some reason Australia has divorced itself from using the sun as a calendar. Winter starts June 1. Solstice be damned! But, for me, pagan that I am at heart, I celebrated the beginning of the winter season by moving my summer clothes into the spare room closet and pulled out my winter clothes. We dashed out two weeks ago and purchased a space heater so we can huddle together on the love seat and stare at the computer screen in comfort. Maybe it was because my house was ALWAYS 65 degrees in the winter (day and evening) that it felt more comfortable than 65 on a Brisbane evening. Maybe it is contrast of the warm sunny afternoons that make the nights feel so frigid.
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3 comments:
but but but!!! The solstice markes the MIDDLE of the season, not the start!
Although I must say, I just do not understand Aus and NZ saying summer starts on Dec 1 and winter on Jun 1, makes no sense at all to me. I grew up in the UK where Midsummer is fairly and squarely bang central on the Summer Solstice, the shortest night. Can't get my head around summer starting a mere three weeks before that.
It must be different in the US because the solistice is the START of summer- even though it has been quite warm for about a month (more or less). I had to look it up to be sure I wasn't losing my mind- which happens. And, I learned from Wikipedia "Summer is one of the four seasons of the year. Almost all English-language calendars, going by astronomy, state that summer begins on the summer solstice and ends on the autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer in the Southern Hemisphere, oppositely, is the time of winter in the north. Alternatively, according to meteorology, summer can be the whole months of June, July, and August, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the whole months of December, January, and February, in the Southern Hemisphere. The convention in Australia is to use the meteorological definition so that summer starts on 1 December." I'm not sure what a meterological definition means for sure. I'm guessing it has something to do with weather trends. (I could look that up- but my brain is tired.) Anyway, Cathi, when does summer begin and end in the UK? And, when does the school year begin?
So why is June 21 called "Midsummer's Eve"????? Wikipedia is showing a decided North American bias here.
I don't really remember people talking about the first day of summer, although May has overtones of it, because the saying "Ne'er cast a clout till May be out" acts as a warning that you don't trust an English Summer until the month of May is finished, or the hawthorn bush (may, as in Queen of the May) has blossomed, depending on your interpretation. We don't say "today's the first day of winter" either.
The school year begins in September, a couple of weeks before the autumnal equinox. Harvest Festival is about the same time, telling us that the height of autumn is passed and we are winding down to winter. The clocks go back at the end of October to show that winter has arrived :) Guy Fawkes Night (5th Nov, and which has replaced Halloween as a fire festival in the celto-british cosmology) is definitely a marker for the beginning of winter. Definitely.
Different countries have different rhythms. Here in NZ Easter is considered a gloomy festival and has no remnant at all of its foundation of celebrating spring. We have no problem with the paradox of chocolate rabbits and eggs celebrating death. But if you ask a lot of Kiwis they'll say Easter is an end-of-year festival, it's when you close up your holiday home, tidy up the garden for the onset of its maintenance phase, clear the guttering and make sure the roof doesn't leak. It's hard to think of rebirth and new life when autumn is well advanced. Even the sermons (not that I've heard many) speak of how in death there is life, a different angle reflecting the upside down world in which you and I find ourselves.
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